


Repetition

by karanguni



Category: Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-31
Updated: 2016-10-31
Packaged: 2018-08-24 09:30:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8367148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/karanguni/pseuds/karanguni
Summary: Perhaps that, Simon thought cynically, was what had driven their mad emperors mad: the incessant and unshakable sensation that one was being constantly watched.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ExtraPenguin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ExtraPenguin/gifts).



It was a cold winter; the coldest on Vorbarr Sultana's record books.

Simon was waiting.

Simon had been waiting for a long time; long enough that he was only slightly mad as he stood at a transit stop, gloved hands tucked deep into the pockets of his greatcoat. Again, he was waiting: though this time just for a tramcar. Snow fell on the short but growing crop of his hair; he shook it off with some impatience.

Simon'd received his commission as ensign nine months ago; it'd taken him six to get out of the habit of shearing his hair down every two. It was not, he'd come to learn, how it was done in the capital, much less ImpSec itself. Perhaps it was a relic of how things were done differently in the Imperial Academy, but Simon didn't have the requisite number of syllables in his name to know. Nor did he particularly care: the Vor, the high Vor, weren't wasted on ImpSec. Public names did not get shoved into private office.

Snow kept falling. The tramcar continued to fail to appear. Per the schedule, it'd been three minutes late twelve minutes ago. Simon kept his hands in his pockets and his face in his scarf; his breath came wet against the wool. There was only one other person waiting alongside him: a woman whose skirts were going dark at the hems from the snow. Unlikely to be anyone of note, but Simon still wondered. ImpSec, of all of Barrayar's many storied institutions, would be the one to employ all comers. Besides the woman, there were two men in greatcoats like his own across the street. Talking, perhaps, or watching; impossible to tell. As impossible as knowing whether the tramcar was late or deliberately delayed.

Simon continued waiting.

Negri had given him this assignment at the same time that he'd stopped getting his hair cut. No: the causality of that was wrong. Simon'd stopped getting his hair cut _because_ Commander Negri had summoned him to his office in the depths of Cockroach HQ and said to him: _Ensign, you've been selected for an exercise._  After that, the thought of allowing someone in a barber's shop to get shears and a sharp razor near his throat bothered Simon too much for him to take the risk.

Within ImpSec, Negri's exercises were the stuff of legend or nightmare. Outside of ImpSec, Negri's exercises didn't exist. The two statements were not at any way at odds: the latter proved the former.

Simon's had been simple enough. _Watch for a watcher and evade capture_. That had all that Negri'd said. _Assignment_ , then, was maybe the wrong word. They were more instructions to survive, and for all Simon knew that was the way that ImpSec worked. The Captain's system of training was as byzantine as it was secure, and its security stemmed from its sheer incomprehensibility.

Negri's had, at least, in some ways rescued Simon from a life of utter banality. In the three months since his assignment out of the boondocks and to Vorbarr Sultana, he'd read fifteen hundred or more pages worth of profiles and written fifteen analysts reports. He'd seen sun for maybe fifteen of each of those long, interminable days protecting the imperium from its own gossip.

Now boredom slid away into slow and mounting paranoia. Perhaps that, Simon thought cynically, was what had driven their mad emperors mad: the incessant and unshakable sensation that one was being constantly watched. Patterns emerged out of nothing. Or perhaps it would be better phrased as patterns emerged out of randomness: the way his commanding looked at him over his comm, the way his butcher always said his name, the way the same man sat opposite him on the tramcar ride back to his apartment every Wednesday and Friday. It made Simon feel like a mathematician deriving god or the devil from the undulating, unending sequence of _pi_. It made him motion sick in the mornings and drove him to drink in the evenings.

The real madness was that there was always a chance that the random was the intentional, and his sole function was to _find it_.

Simon waited for patterns in movement and patterns of habit and patterns of speech. Simon waited for the same face or voice or machine to present itself to him more than once. Simon waited for the day when the mental exhaustion would cripple him; when he'd let his training lapse and his patience falter only to– to what? Be deemed not good enough by Captain Negri– for what? And then punished or reassigned– as what? Simon waited for the answers to those questions, too.

When he went to bed that night, having caught the tramcar (simply delayed at the depot: snow had to be shovelled to free it from its bank) with the woman (a Lady Vorallyn, by all intents, per how she'd answered her comm) and then alighted two stops before his usual (in order to eliminate from his list of possible watchers any false positives whose commuter schedules had simply coincided with his own) and then gone up the service lifts to his apartment – after all that, when Simon went to bed that night, he dreamed of fractal patterns exploding apart to form disjointed, warped tessellated monsters.

By the end of the new year, Simon still hadn't found his watcher. But, then again, neither had he failed to evade whatever capture he was supposed to be avoiding.

He'd begun to wonder if the phrase _capture_  had meant something more philosophical when Negri announced that he was to be promoted to Lieutenant, a full year or more ahead of the curve.

Simon hadn't known how to react to that. All through the course of his assignment, he'd learned a myriad of useless facts about the way HQ worked: the cyclic ebb and flow of its majors and colonels, the tidal motion of diplomatic and domestic crises arising and then resolving themselves. He'd learned that Captain Negri had no military secretary and only ever ate lunches at 1400 in the afternoon. He'd memorised the schedules of each of the tenants in his building. He'd learned more about tramlines than was likely ever going to be relevant. And all of it was dross: _I've been watching,_  Simon supposed he'd never be able to write in any report, _but what am I watching for?_

Maybe it had been for the further five reports that he'd written in the time since, or maybe it had been for the fact that Simon still, somehow, managed to wake up in the mornings without having frothed over into madness. But whatever it had been for, Captain Negri said he was to receive his new tabs in his office that afternoon; no parade ceremonies for Horus-eye wearers, or plebs.

So Simon let it go. He polished his boots and starched his uniform, then reported to Captain Negri's office at 1359 on the dot, though he did not let himself rap his knuckles upon the door until the chrono ticked to 1400 sharp.

'Illyan,' Negri had said, looking up. There was a plastic box on his table, just large enough to fit two collar tabs and a change in station.

'Yes, sir,' Simon said, coming to attention, and that was when Negri removed a stunner from his desk drawer and shot him.

* * *

 

When Simon awoke, he was in a plainly but adequately furnished room and Negri had left him slumped over a tea table. When Simon managed to clear his head enough to sit up, he was hit by the smell of hot, strong tea being steeped. His cold fingers ached, suddenly, for warmth.

Negri was seated opposite him, and was wielding a battered old teapot from which he poured two cups of tea. Negri pushed one over without a word and Simon took it; he also took the opportunity to glance out the only half-curtained window and down at the street below. Simon felt his eyes widen despite himself.

'Most men don't look above them,' Captain Negri said, cutting into Simon's thoughts.

Simon turned away from the excellent view down onto his street and his apartment across the way. 'In what sense, sir?' he managed. 'Literally or,' he suppressed a _noise_ , 'metaphorically? Because I never caught sight of anyone watching this apartment and I'd _looked_ , and if _you've_  been watching me at HQ it wasn't by any means I had ways of monitoring.'

Negri looked a little amused at that, but Simon figured he'd earned the right to snap somewhat. The Chief of Imperial Security shrugged, a tight motion, and sipped his tea. 'What did you learn from his, lieutenant?'

At least he was still calling him _lieutenant_. Still, Simon felt at sea. 'That there are people capable of watching without being seen in turn.'

'Untrue,' Negri commented lightly. 'There were a few nights I was here when I let the curtain stay open and a light on while I watched.' This made Simon bite his teeth to keep from shuddering. 'Not very often, but maybe you would have thought something about it if you didn't go to sleep so reliably at midnight every evening.'

'Only if there'd been a pattern of observation that I could've caught,' Simon said, helplessly going along with the conversation even though he had no idea what it was that Negri wanted him to _say_. 'I'm assuming you didn't _let_ there be a pattern, sir.'

Negri put down his cup with a sigh; it was a _pleased_  sigh. The china hit its saucer with a sharp tinkle. 'And there it is, lieutenant: yes. There wasn't a pattern. And what does that teach you?'

Simon stared across the table. 'That when there aren't patterns to be caught... you don't catch shit, sir; I don't know.'

If his frustration upset Negri, Negri didn't let it show. 'That's correct. Patterns are mnemonics, Illyan – they're ways of helping us parse and recall something significant amidst the constant stream of insignificance. But the problem is, as you said, that there isn't always a pattern, or a rhyme, or a reason. So one does his best to know what to look for, and tries his best to recall what it was he _saw_.'

Simon kept silent.

Negri leaned over the small table. 'Then we run into the problem of memory.'

Simon blinked. 'Memory, sir.'

'The empire is its imperium, Illyan,' Negri leaned back. 'The movings and dealings of its subjects. We could have cameras on every street and still not know what we need to know: we'd still need cameras in bedrooms, in shitholes, in whorehouses, in the smoking room where the counts meet before council sessions. Then it's Vorsomething's word against Vorsomeone else's; Suspect A versus Suspect B. And that is annoying.'

'Annoying,' Simon repeated, feeling like a broken doll.

'Annoying. For ImpSec, and for Emperor Ezar especially – _he_  knows that most of what goes on in the circles of empire has to be seen to be believed.' Negri made that same abbreviated shrugging motion a second time. _A pattern_ , whispered something in Simon's head. 'But it came to the attention of Emperor Ezar that the Illyricans have a certain technology which they are willing to trade with us for: eidetic memory chip implants. What that trade is doesn't matter – it's been completed. What matters is that the right subject of Ezar's with the right profile be selected for the procedure.'

'And that person,' Simon said slowly, 'is supposed to be me.'

'The most common side effect by far is schizophrenia,' smiled Negri. 'Do you feel like you've already become somewhat acquainted with something adjacent to that?'

Simon finally put his teacup to his lips. He took a long sip and wished it was something stronger.

'By common,' Negri said, his gaze never having left Simon's face, 'the Illyricans mean 50%.' Simon watched Negri in return; said nothing until Negri went on, 'Emperor Ezar requests and requires that you undergo the procedure to have it installed. Your ship leaves in three days.'

Then it was Negri who waited until Simon finished his tea and set his cup down. It took him a moment, but he looked across the table and said, 'Why promote me, sir, if there is a 50% chance that it will mean nothing?'

'Because it would have cost me nothing in its meaninglessness and posthumous promotion will put you at captain,' said Negri, who smiled and who had been captain himself for enough years that even Simon knew how little that rank meant. 'While on the other hand, it wouldn't have done for one of Ezar's most useful and resilient men to be just an ensign.'

'Ah,' said Simon. He paused again, then got to his feet and to beleaguered attention. His ribs hurt from the stunner shot. 'If I may be dismissed, sir,' Simon asked, keeping his eyes pinned to the far wall. There was a mirror on it, and his reflection stared back through him.

Negri hummed, then stood and came around. He had, Simon noticed just then, the small plastic box from before in one hand. The captain stepped behind him and Simon swallowed, hard, and then barely managed not to flinch when Negri's hands came around to touch his collar. The backs of Negri's knuckles brushed the underside of his throat as the commander worked his old ensign tabs off. Simon watched himself in the mirror like a man viewing something on screen: something distant, something unreal.

'When all of this is over,' said Negri to the versions of themselves in the mirror. He left his hands resting just briefly over Simon's throat, then slid one up until he held Simon's adam's apple and had his thumb over the thundering pulse in Simon's neck. His voice was very close to Simon's ear. This, Simon thought, is not evading capture. Negri tightened his grip, and when Simon leaned into it and not away, Negri said, 'I do hope, lieutenant, that you remember _this_.'


End file.
